Nazi flight memoir was fiction, author confesses

Misha Defonseca, whose bestselling account of a childhood flight from the Nazis was made into a feature film and translated into 18 languages, has admitted that her memoir is a work of fiction. Surviving with Wolves, her story of a 1,900 mile trek across Europe, living with a pack of wolves and shooting a German soldier in self defence, is now said to bear little resemblance to any real course of events in the author's life.

Defonseca, a Belgian writer who now lives in Massachusetts, was contacted by her own lawyers in the wake of research published in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir questioning her story. The 71-year-old author, conceded that she was not Jewish and confessed that she had fabricated the story.

"Yes, my name is Monique De Wael, but I have wanted to forget it since I was four years old," she said in a statement from her lawyers obtained by Associated Press. "My parents were arrested and I was taken in by my grandfather, Ernest De Wael, and my uncle, Maurice De Wael. I was called 'daughter of a traitor' because my father was suspected of having talked under torture in the prison of Saint-Gilles. Ever since I can remember, I felt Jewish."

According to Defonseca, despite the book's fictional nature it still contains an emotional truth.

"The book is a story, it's my story," she said. "It's not the true reality, but it is my reality. There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world."

De Wael's story is not the first fabricated account of surviving the Holocaust. In 1994, Binjamin Wilkomirski published Fragments, recounting his experiences as a four-year-old in a Nazi concentration camp in occupied Poland. He was later revealed to have spent the war in Switzerland.

Similarly, Bernard Brougham - under the name Holstein - also claimed to be a survivor, and went so far as to brand himself with a bogus tattoo to authenticate his 2004 book Stolen Soul.